Bush-Cheney to Trumpistan, America is Going from Far Right to Further Right

Today’s MAGA-fied, dysfunctional GOP is responsible for the chaos of Trump’s second term, both at home & overseas.

Donald Trump still feels the sting of the 2020 defeat and is eager to use his lackeys to target states like Georgia, Arizona for—what else?— revenge.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

Those supporting Donald Trump 2.0’s power grab attempts, now focused on the midterms, include some Indian Americans and other non-White Republicans, both Christian and non-Christian. No election fraud has been found in Georgia or other states, but in the run-up to the midterms, MAGA activists aim to sow suspicion in the minds of voters. 

“If the Democrats don’t win the midterms, we’ll end up in Trumpistan,” someone said on Zoom.

“What do you mean?” another person retorted. “We’re already living in Trumpistan!”

Then there was a caller (admittedly, the Zoom participants were highly partisan) who mentioned an out-of-control elephant, which he said reminded him of America. The comparison was apt. While the pachyderm is the Republican Party’s symbol, it also symbolises—if we think of a wild elephant—how today’s MAGA-fied and dysfunctional Grand Old Party (GOP), to use the Republican Party’s grand abbreviation, is responsible for the chaos of Trump’s second term, both at home and overseas.

America First

Think of the Iran war. What shocked and awed us was how the “America First” commander in chief embroiled his nation, so needlessly and heedlessly, in a conflict that’s even more unpopular than the Iraq war. The Republican-controlled Congress was unable or unwilling to stop Trump’s reckless adventurism.

Hard though it may seem to believe now, the Iraq war in 2003 had initial public support, not least because Geroge Bush Jr and Dick Cheney were able to make the case for it.

However flawed their reasoning, they at least went through the proper channels and got congressional approval. Trump didn’t do that before his unilateral decision, which was made without offering any proof of imminent threat. And now, despite the immense destruction and suffering, there seems to be no viable plan for dealing with the aftermath of an expensive, unnecessary war.

How did the GOP swing so far to the right that even George W Bush finds it unrecognisable? To think we considered the Bush-Cheney administration extreme!

In recent years, we’ve spilled much ink to understand this rightward shift, which touches on the forever wars, neoliberalism, growing inequality, immigration, economic dislocation, demographic change, siloed media, gerrymandering, cultural change, primaries, and campaign contributions. Populism’s rise, on the right and left, means trust is low.

Still, there’s an important distinction. The GOP now is a Far Right Party. The Democratic Party, notwithstanding its shortcomings, remains a mainstream party.

Think also of 6 January 2021. That infamous day, when the US Capitol was under assault, is a grim reminder that these days only the Democratic Party seems to believe in democracy. Trump’s autogolpe (or autocoup) failed, but that doesn’t mean he and his loyalists have stopped obsessing about the 2020 election, not to mention the upcoming midterms, which, thanks to an increasingly unpopular Trump administration, the Republicans will probably lose. It’s hardly surprising that Trump, having tried gerrymandering, is looking into other ways to influence the midterms.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s viral clip, showing him chugging beer as he wildly celebrated with the US men’s hockey team after their gold medal victory at the Winter Olympics, won’t be forgotten soon. His controversial and chaotic leadership won’t be forgotten either. More than his lavish spending and trips, what’s alarming is his vengeful pursuit of Trump’s perceived enemies.

It was FBI agents who, in a jaw-dropping development, came to Fulton County, Georgia, with a search warrant and seized hundreds of boxes filled with ballots and other documents tied to the 2020 presidential election.

This heavily Democratic county, where Black people form the largest group and people of colour are the majority, is the state’s most populous county. As many will recall, Trump, alleging that fraud made him lose the state to Biden in the 2020 election, brazenly asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes” and overturn the result. A criminal investigation found no fraud in the county, or indeed anywhere else in this GOP-ruled state.

Autocratic Turns

Trump, though, still feels the sting of the 2020 defeat. He remains eager to use his lackeys to target states like Georgia and Arizona for—what else?—revenge. No fraud will be uncovered, but in the run-up to the midterms, they probably hope to sow suspicion in the minds of some voters. Trump, unsurprisingly, made no allegations of fraud in the 2024 election, which he won even in states like Georgia and Arizona. Laws, rationality, and decency are subverted when a far-right party led by a strongman is determined to stay in power. That’s autocracy.

We’ve heard how White Christian nationalism facilitates the slide towards authoritarianism. What’s crucial as well, if not as widely reported, is the role of MAGA right-wingers who are not White and sometimes not even Christian.

Kash Patel is an obvious example. But while Patel is a powerful official in the Trump administration, he is not a cabinet member, unlike Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence, identifies as Hindu and is of part Samoan descent. And she is as MAGA as they come. Before joining the GOP, Gabbard, who is also a military officer, renounced her allegiance to the Democratic Party, where she got her start as Hawaii’s representative in the US House. In another astonishing scene, which could have been out of a B-grade spy movie or a Banana Republic, Gabbard, sporting a baseball hat, was seen lurking near the FBI agents when they seized the aforementioned boxes in Fulton County.

What does that tell us about the US, which is marking its 250th anniversary this year? The nation is in serious trouble indeed when cabinet members, not just the president, dabble in far-out conspiracy theories and election denialism.

So how far will MAGA go in the attempt to rig the midterms? There are “plenty of reasons to worry,” according to David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia University.

“Trump has already called on Republicans to ‘nationalise’ elections, railed against a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud, pardoned people involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, pressured senators to force through a SAVE America Act that would effectively disenfranchise millions, and more,” Pozen told The New York Times.

Far and Further Right

Also concerning is that Trump will get more desperate if he remains underwater in the polls, as seems likely. As we get closer to November, what else will he and his underlings do to retain power? After 6 January 2021, nothing should surprise us. The MAGA-fication of the GOP, as moderates get sidelined or abandon the party, has been going on for a while. It’s an ironic fate for Lincoln’s Grand Old Party, which was founded in 1854 by activists opposed to slavery.

Strange though it seems, some Indian American politicians, policymakers, and polemicists support this ethnonationalist drift. Mainstream Republicans who can counter this—people like Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal—are missing in action.

Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy, not a moderate by any means, has a decent shot at becoming Ohio’s next governor. Interestingly, while Haley and Jindal identify as Christian, Ramaswamy has remained Hindu. Which goes to show that in today’s MAGA-fied GOP, non-Whites who are not Christian can make up for the deficit by being sufficiently Trumpian—which, ultimately, is the “religion” that matters most.

To be fair, we still have Indian American Republicans (the writer Ramesh Ponnuru comes to mind) who play a more moderate role. He is not part of the conservative crack-up. For that, we have to turn to another Catholic writer, Dinesh D’Souza, who has been a singular GOP figure since the 1980s. Born into a Goan family in Bombay the year India annexed Goa, D’Souza was tapped by Ronald Reagan as a policy adviser in the final year of his presidency.

D’Souza (unlike his Texan son-in-law, a MAGA representative in the US House) is not a politician. Instead, he made his mark in the 1990s as a hard-hitting conservative author. But, the days when he was known for weighty if controversial tomes such as Illiberal Education and The End of Racism are far behind him.

D’Souza’s descent into the MAGA world, both as a writer and filmmaker who peddles in election denialism and bizarre conspiracy theories, has been so deep that there may be no better non-White spokesperson for what the GOP has become under Trump.

We know how the Reagan revolution ended. How will the Trump revolution end?

(Murali Kamma is a managing editor and writer based in Atlanta, Georgia. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)